Defeat by Design: Alfred Cope and the British
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Hide seek and negotiate: Alfred Cope and counter intelligence in Ireland 1919–1921 Article Accepted Version Sloan, G. (2018) Hide seek and negotiate: Alfred Cope and counter intelligence in Ireland 1919–1921. Intelligence and National Security, 33 (2). pp. 176-195. ISSN 1743-9019 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.1329118 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/67484/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.1329118 Publisher: Taylor & Francis All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online 1 HIDE SEEK AND NEGOTIATE: ALFRED COPE AND COUNTER INTELLIGENCE IN IRELAND 1919-1921 The negotiations which he (Cope ) undertook at considerable danger to himself were approved by his superiors and he was able to bring about a state of affairs whereby the treaty of 1921 could be signed.1 I do not know if anything can be done to restrain persons like Mr Cope from preaching rebel doctrines in this Brigade Area. The area administered by the Essex Regiment is a bad one, and the rebels were only kept from over-running the whole area by the good military spirit shown by this regiment.2 Perhaps it is true of Andy (Alfred Cope) as it is of most of those who have had to make their own way to make, and have made it, that he clings to power won against the odds more jealously then men to whom power has come without great effort.3 INTRODUCTION These three epigraphs illustrate both the personality and the actions of the Englishman Alfred ‘Andy’ Cope who, between 1920 and 1922, held the post of Assistant under Secretary in Dublin Castle, with specific responsibility for police administration and efficiency,then the centre of British administration in Ireland. This was a period when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was engaged in fighting an insurgency inside its borders. Foot has chronicled his career before his posting to Ireland4. He has also suggested the nature of Cope’s activities with respect to the leaders of this insurgency: “After several false starts, he secured the confidence of the principle Irish revolutionary leaders, Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and Eamon de Valera, in his own good faith, while remaining perfectly loyal to the crown…and he played a major part in securing the truce of 11 July 1921”5. Foot also revealed on 1 The Times 14th May 1954. 2 Memo by Colonel Commandant 17th Infantry Brigade to Headquarters 6th Division, Ireland ,15th September 1921.Strickland Papers ,Imperial War Museum P363. 3 The Last Days of Dublin Castle ,The Diaries of Mark Sturgis,(ed M. Hopkinson) Dublin: Irish Academic Press 1999 ,p42. 4 Alfred William Cope was born in 1877 and entered government service as a boy clerk. He joined the detective branch of the department of customs and excise in 1896 ;and was made a preventative inspector in 1908.His energy and intelligence soon made him head of the branch in London and he spent ten adventurous years pursuing smugglers and illicit distillers, especially in the docklands.” M. R. D. Foot, Dictionary of National Biography 1951-1960 ,Oxford :Oxford University Press,1971 p251. 5 Ibid p 252. 2 whose authority he was acting: “Ostensibly his task was to preserve civil order through the Royal Irish Constabulary; in fact he had already been charged by Lloyd George with the task of sounding out Sinn Fein opinion about the possibilities of a truce in the Anglo-Irish war”.6 Hopkinson has endorsed this judgement: “He became, probably at Lloyd George’s wish, the main British contact with Sinn Fein and the IRA and set up a host of peace initiatives, nervy and highly strung by temperament, Cope was intensely hard working but seemed unable to delegate”.7 His activities during this period are critical to understand as they go far to explain the outcome of the insurgency. However, this is hampered by two things: “The secretive character of Cope’s work and the absence of personal papers make him a tantalisingly enigmatic figure”.8 Most of the existing literature, with the exception of the diaries of Mark Sturgis, which contain both oblique and candid references to Cope’s activities,9 support a teleological narrative that he was carrying out a policy formulated by Lloyd George and enacted by a small group of civil servants in Dublin Castle. This article will address the unquestioned impediments indicated by Hopkinson in a two-fold manner. First, by framing the empirical evidence of his activities, between June 1920 and the October 1922 with a counter-intelligence analysis. Dulles defined counter-intelligence in the following manner: “Counter-espionage is inherently a protective and defensive operation. Its primary purpose is to thwart espionage against one’s country, but it may also be extremely useful in uncovering hostile penetration and subversive plots.”10 The perennial concepts or variables of counter-intelligence are to ‘locate, identify and neutralize’. Zuehlke developed a more nuanced approach when he argued that there was an essential corollary to any counter- intelligence activity. He described it as ’counter-intelligence information’11 His point was that these three variables oversimplify a complex reality. He cited Sherman Kent because he : “shows an awareness of this vital feature by mentioning ’the knowledge and the activity’ that must precede action taken against the 6 Ibid p252. 7 The Last Days of Dublin Castle ,The Diaries of Mark Sturgis (ed M. Hopkinson) Dublin :Irish Academic Press ,1998 p5-6. 8 Ibid p6. 9 Mark Sturgis was a British civil servant from the Treasury who was appointed joint Assistant Secretary along with Cope in May 1920.Interestingly he was not gazetted in that position until after the truce in July 1921.His diaries which he kept of this period were published in 1998.They will be used in this article. However, he was careful to limit any specific references to Cope’s contacts to the leaders of Sinn Fein. 10 A. Dulles ,The Craft of Intelligence, London Weidenfeld and Nicolson ,1963p122. 11 A.A. Zuehike, What is Counter-intelligence? From Intelligence Requirements for the 1980’s(ed R.Godson) London: Transaction Books,1980,.p15. 3 threat. He is alluding to the process of gathering, compiling, analyzing, and using CI information to support the countering operation.”12 The question is to what extent do counter-intelligence concepts such as gathering, compiling and analyzing secret information provide some explanatory power to understand Cope’s activities in Ireland between 1920 and 1921? There are also a number of associated questions which will be addressed. To what extent did his relationship with the leaders of the insurgency facilitate a British Government decision to progressively grant de facto legal immunity to the leaders of the insurgency? Did he systematically pass confidential information; including secret communication ciphers that endangered the lives of members of the Royal Irish Constabulary and undermined the effectiveness of police operations against the IRA? It is important to acknowledge that identifying the key cause of something is not straightforward and needs careful qualification. As Lewis has argued:”When we claim to have identified ‘the cause of something’ we are really making a claim about which part of the causal history is most salient for the purposes of some particular inquiry.”13 To answer these questions it is necessary to make an assessment of the nature of the intelligence organisations that existed prior to 1919.In addition, an assessment of the efficacy of the new intelligence organisations that were set up in Ireland from 1920 onwards is also needed. It will be argued that British intelligence community in Ireland located and identified accurately Cope’s developing relationship with the leaders of the insurgency. However, his activities proved impervious to any countering operation. Therefore both process and product are important. How do we judge the effectiveness of intelligence during this period? There is the challenge of understanding the nature of intelligence itself. Laqueur summarised it in the following way: “On the one hand it (intelligence) refers to an organisation collecting information and on the other to the information that has been gathered.”14 Sherman Kent interpreted intelligence as both ‘a process and an end –product’. In addition, he developed the hypothesis that intelligence activity consists of two sorts of operation: “I have called them the surveillance operation, by which I mean the many ways by which the contemporary world is put 12 Ibid p15. 13 D. Lewis. (check reference) 14 Quoted in C. Andrew , R.J.Aldrich and W.K. Wark(eds) Secret Intelligence :A Reader, Abingdon:Routledge ,2009 p6. 4 under close and systematic observation, and the research operation. By the latter I mean the attempts to establish meaningful patterns out of what was observed in the past and attempts to get meaning out of what appears to be going on now.”15 David Kahn’s historical theory of intelligence draws attention to the extent that intelligence optimises resources.16 One of the accepted judgements about the insurgency during this period was that the intelligence resources of the British state did not have any tangible effect on the insurgency: “Neither the Army nor the police were able to build the essential foundation for success in guerrilla warfare, a dependable intelligence service.”17 Townshend fails to comment on one important dimension: a new intelligence community was created in the midst of an insurgency.